"The Middleman" To Bring Talking Monkeys Back To TV

Another comic book is about to jump mediums, this time to television. The Hollywood Reporter has announced that the Viper Comics book "The Middleman," created by writer Javier Grillo-Marxuach, whose television work includes the hit TV show "Medium" and "Lost" as well as comics "Wraith" and "SuperSkrull," is close to receiving the green light on a pilot episode from ABC Family.

This brings the book full circle as "The Middleman" returns to where it all started, as a pilot script. Grillo-Marxuach had written the pilot on spec back in 1999, which he described on his blog as "...an over-the-top, sixteen-car-pileup-sugar-popped-cereal-bowl of a series that's not afraid to be everything your mother warned you about television: a cartoonishly extreme, randomly fantastic, special-effects laden, three-fisted walking-and-talking toy-line advertisement of an action-adventure-sci-fi comic book in which the fabric of reality barely survives in the end, and the journey invariably reveals a completely

"The Middleman" Volume 3, Page 17

"The Middleman" Volume 3, Page 18

surreal strangeness behind everything we hold to be true." The script wouldn't see the light of day until 2004, when comics writer Paul Dini, working alongside Grillo-Marxuach on the set of "Lost," inspired him to revive it as a comic book.

"'The Middleman' has been a passion project for me for almost a decade," Grillo-Marxuach told CBR News. "I'm lucky to see it optioned by a network willing to take chances on some truly out of the box material, and can't wait to deliver the genre-bending weirdness of 'The Middleverse' to television!"

Stay tuned to CBR for more from Grillo-Marxuach on the new pilot and what the future holds for "The Middleman" comic book.